


turtle pervert

by CordeliaRose



Series: Morey Appreciation Week 2020 [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Aquariums, First Dates, M/M, Mason knows things about starfish and sea cucumbers, Morey Appreciation Week, Morey Appreciation Week 2020, morey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 15:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28958340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CordeliaRose/pseuds/CordeliaRose
Summary: Mason and Corey's first date, as never shown but alluded to in canon.For Morey Appreciation Week 2020, Day #1: Missing from Canon.
Relationships: Corey Bryant/Mason Hewitt
Series: Morey Appreciation Week 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123970
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	turtle pervert

**Author's Note:**

> hey y'all! this is my first fic for the morey appreciation week 2020!  
> i've never participated in something like this before but if you're a regular reader of mine, you'll already know that i love corey & morey, so this is ~perfect~  
> these fics aren't going to be as long as some of my others, because i'm writing these on a deadline and also going back to uni starting tomorrow, so, that's fun. but i'm pretty determined to see this week through & post everything on time, & i'm super excited to be a part of this!

This is a disaster. A catastrophe on a scale that has never been observed before.

The tragic heroes of Greek epics have nothing on him – Odysseus’ twenty-year journey to return home, filled with perils and woes; Oedipus’ accidental incest and punitive self-enucleation; Achilles’ overwhelming grief at the death of his lover; none of them compare to the behemoth of a travesty that Mason is currently experiencing.

He finally, finally, finally has a date with a cute boy – and he has nothing to wear. He’s carefully considered and then discarded every garment of clothing in his wardrobe; his bedroom floor is a colourful mosaic of denim jeans, wrinkled chinos, and vibrant shirts. He has no idea what the dress code for a first date at the aquarium is, but he’s certain that nothing so far has fit the criteria.

A shower provides a burst of inspiration, and once he’s dried himself he finds a pair of black jeans and a plain white T-shirt, throwing a light blue denim jacket on over the top and surmising that he doesn’t look too terrible, so it’ll have to do. The doorbell chimes just as he’s shoved his shoes on, and he thunders down the stairs to reach the front door before either of his parents can, both of them entirely too gleeful over the prospect of his date.

Mason successfully hustles them both out of the house before his dad can appear with a plate of baked goods and lure Corey inside, or his mom insists on offering their guest a drink before they head off, and they catch a bus at the end of the block. Their conversation is stilted at first – more on Mason’s part, he has to admit, he’s not a particular smooth-talker or natural flirt, but Corey fills the gaps with small anecdotes about his jobs and questions about Mason’s life, and by the time they reach the stop closest to the aquarium a conversation about schoolwork is flowing easily.

The date continues surprisingly well. Mason had been nothing short of convinced that within five minutes they’d have descended into an uncomfortable silence and forevermore be doomed to exchange small talk and awkwardly nod when they passed each other in the school corridors, but dialogue spills from him as easily as if he’d known Corey for years, natural and thoughtless in the best way.

The aquarium was a good choice – Corey loves animals, it turns out, and is quite happy to stand and stare at the various creatures for as long as he can, and unlike most people seems to genuinely appreciate Mason’s spurting of random facts. “Do you know clownfish are endangered because after Finding Nemo came out, so many people wanted them as pets that they were massively overfished?” he says at one point as they examine a school swimming in and out of an anemone.

“Really? That sucks. People are stupid.” Corey crouches to peer into the tank better, the glass enclosures built low to the ground for the benefit of children. “They are really cute, though. I would totally have one.”

“Well, you could always get some from breeders,” Mason points out. “There are loads of programs that are helping with the conservation efforts and also sell some captive-bred ones as pets. We had a bearded dragon when I was younger, we bought her from a zoo which used the money to help other endangered species.”

“Huh. Maybe I will, then.” Corey straightens back up and shoots him a brilliant smile over his shoulder. Mason’s heart pauses, then thumps harder than usual like it’s trying to escape his chest in a violent display of affection. “Do you have any pets now?”

“Oh, no. My parents are super busy at work, which is why we got a bearded dragon in the first place. They’re pretty low maintenance as long as you have the right equipment. I really like dogs, but it wouldn’t be fair to get one right now. We’re not at home enough and I don’t think I’d have enough time to walk it.”

They chat about pets they’d like to own in the future as they pass through the exhibits, pausing to discuss how creepily intelligent octopuses are as they pass a Giant Pacific named Beverley. Corey tells him about one in an aquarium in New Zealand that was discovered to escape its tank at night and sneak around the building, eating fish from the other enclosures, and Mason returns with his own story of how they’re known to juggle hermit crabs and punch fish out of spite.

After a good couple of hours of wandering around – a good portion of which is spent identifying the penguins by their tags and a corresponding information board, cooing over baby sea lions as they flop inelegantly on imitation ice bergs, and comparing the otters to puppies as they playfully wrestle with each other – they find themselves at the touch tanks. An employee introduces them to a variety of starfish, sea cucumbers and anemones in one, and the cownose rays and epaulette sharks in another, and offers to take photos of them both as they make friends with the friendly creatures. She leaves them to it after that, apparently deciding that they’re trustworthy, and strolls off through an Employees Only door while requesting somebody get the bucket of fish ready on her radio.

“Starfish can turn their stomachs inside-out, right?” Corey asks, running his fingers through the jelly-like strands of an anemone. 

“Yeah. So, they eat shellfish like clams and mussels, but they’re not strong enough to fully open the shells. So they pry them open just a little bit and then push their stomach through their mouth into the open shell, eat the insides, and then pull their stomachs back out.” Mason is preoccupied with one of the sea cucumbers, brushing his fingertips over it lightly, but he glances up after a few seconds of silence to see Corey staring at him. “What?”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“Oh, well, I, uh.” His cheeks are growing warm; he ducks his head and refocuses on the sea cucumber. “I just hear or read things, and I think they’re interesting, so I don’t forget. Like, I did a project on starfish in the sixth grade and everything I learnt about them was super interesting, so now I remember it.”

“What else do you remember?” Corey drops his gaze – it’s both a relief and a blight to be free from the intense scrutiny.

“They can also regenerate limbs,” Mason offers, shuffling round to examine his own starfish. It just so happens to be next to Corey’s, so he ends up a few inches closer to the other boy. Just a side-effect of scientific curiosity, of course. “Some of them can even regenerate their bodies from just a tiny bit of limb.”

“That’s awesome.”

“Yeah, they’re insane. They also have an eye on the tip of each arm, and they don’t have any blood – they have like, filtered seawater instead. And they don’t have a brain.”

Corey is looking at him in the same way again, indistinguishable and intense. “Do you know anything about sea cucumbers?”

“Uh…” Mason racks his brain. “Some species can contract their muscles and throw their own internal organs with some kind of toxic substance at predators as a defence mechanism, and then regenerate them later. Oh, and they breathe through their anuses.”

“Same,” Corey says, and moves on before Mason has the chance to ask which fact he’s relating to specifically. “What about anemones?”

“Not much. They have a symbiotic relationship with clownfish, and they can reproduce by lateral fission.”

“Which is…?”

“They basically just sprout an identical anemone from their sides. It’s pretty cool.”

“So when you say ‘not much’, you actually mean ‘quite a lot’?”

“That’s not a lot,” Mason protests, “that was only two facts, that’s a baseline.”

“Baseline,” Corey repeats, smiling in a way that can be described only as fond. “You really are something, Mason Hewitt.”

Mason doesn’t know how to even begin formulating a response to that, so he falls back on his usual tactic: avoidance and distraction. He grabs a couple of paper towels from the dispenser next to the tanks and begins wiping his hands dry instead of addressing the statement. “Want to go to the ocean tunnel?” he says instead. Corey’s eyes light up and he grabs his own towels, wishing the inhabitants of the touch tanks a heartfelt farewell as they head out and into the next room.

Inside the completely glass tunnel – which is all at once terrifying, trippy, and incredibly cool – the rippling waters cast shades of turquoise prisms over them, bathing them in the glow of another world. Mason’s only pulled back to reality when he pulls out his phone to snap a sneaky photo of Corey giggling at a stingray as it floats overhead and discovers a message from Liam, reminding him to get information about Theo. 

Mason looks back up to where Corey is interrogating a hermit crab about “why you’re like that”, and then back down to the message. He pockets his phone. Fuck the supernatural mess of his life, no way he’s ruining this. 

They repeat the loop of the tunnel several times, exclaiming over new creatures with each lap; on one circuit a nurse shark becomes an obsession, on another they find a massive green sea turtle huddled in a dark corner. His information board states that his name is Julio, and he can hold his breath for up to seven hours while resting. His heartbeat slows to a beat every nine minutes to conserve energy, which sends Corey into an existential spiral about how strange biology is, and Mason into his own similar but rather more cheerful spiral about how cool biology is.

It’s on the fifth lap round that Mason finally gives in to his impulses. Corey is alternating between staring at a leisurely shark in awe and reading a Cool Shark Facts! board aloud, muttering to himself, “Sharks can have up to five rows of teeth and up to fifty teeth in each row,” when Mason kisses him.

The dimmed dapples of light thrown over them and the quiet, repetitive sloshing of the water push everything else out of his mind. He’s existing purely in the moment – never before, never after, just present. There aren’t fireworks, but there’s suddenly a sense of relief, like an itch at the back of his skull that he wasn’t even aware of has been soothed.

A loud thump interrupts them – Mason, on guard ever since he realised that there were indeed things that went bump in the night, skitters backwards a couple of paces as he glances around, but the culprit strikes again and reveals itself to be the giant turtle. It knocks its great head against the glass one more time with an expression of supreme indifference.

“I think Julio is homophobic,” Mason says, frowning at the cockblocking marine creature. 

“Or maybe he likes to watch,” Corey suggests as a counter. He hadn’t reacted quite as strongly as Mason – give it a few more months in the supernatural world and he’ll probably be there too – but he had jolted back too, scanning the room for the source of the noise. He’s also eying up the turtle, but then he turns back to Mason with a grin so bright it kind of hurts in his chest a little. “Turtle pervert.”

Regardless of Julio, and his either homophobia or voyeuristic habits, Mason surges forwards to kiss him again.

**Author's Note:**

> [please go here to visit the official morey appreciation tumblr that's running this morey appreciation week!](https://moreyappreciation.tumblr.com/)  
> and a big shoutout to idk-ilike5sos for beta'ing this for me! you can find her here on [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/idk_ilike5sos/pseuds/idk_ilike5sos/) or [tumblr](https://idk-ilike5sos.tumblr.com/):)  
> you can also talk to me on [tumblr](https://cordelia---rose.tumblr.com/) or check out my [fandoms sideblog](https://cordeliarosebutfandoms.tumblr.com/)  
> and as always, kudos & comments are dearly appreciated <3


End file.
